3 Painless Ways to Train Yourself to Wake Up Earlier

Do you want to be a morning person? Do you want to use those quiet morning hours to be productive or take care of your body or cook or do your taxes or read or catch up on your correspondence or do one of the 25 million things the day never seems long enough for? Have you tried a million times to be a morning person and never successfully been able to complete the transition? We understand and we're here to offer a few words of advice on how to successfully become the morning person you aspire to be.

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1. Do it in stages.

Say you usually wake up at 8am and you've all of a sudden decided you want to be a 6am person. Well shaving that two hours off lickity-split will not be easy, and if you try to do it all at once there's an unfortunately high likelihood that you'll fail. So why not try it in stages. Shave off 15 minutes at a time. I.e. wake up at 7:45am for a few days, then go down to 7:30 and so on and so on. Odds are, this transition will be more effective then a all-at-once attempt.

2. Make a nighttime schedule.

One of the hardest parts about transitioning to being a morning person is making sure that you get enough sleep. So here's a hack: focus on the night, not the morning, and make a nighttime schedule. Make sure the schedule has you getting to bed in time to get at least seven hours of sleep, and then stick to said schedule! If you're up until all hours there is no way you'll make good on your being-a-morning-person promise.

3. Stop pressing snooze. Seriously. Just stop.

How many times can we keep reading about the need to stop pressing snooze? Research shows that pressing snooze is actually terrible for us — the sleep we get post-snooze is not satisfying, and actually leads to us feeling groggy throughout the day. So just stop it, cut it out, take this habit out of rotation. The best way to do that is likely to put the alarm clock in a place that requires you to get out of bed to turn it off. Then when it goes off in the morning, and you get up to deal with it, go immediately from there to the shower. Don't let yourself fall back into bed, it might feel good in the moment but it will totally kill the rest of your day.